‘These are my first impressions,’ said Quinn, ‘but there is something about this country that blows my mind.’
‘Have a beer,’ he offered Quinn, on the Friday night at Gograndli when he broke out his Coopers and started to feed into himself the numbing, stunned-mullet quality of too-long-withheld pleasures.
‘I’m right with this,’ said Quinn, holding up his cigarette between nicotine-stained fingers.
‘You don’t drink?’
‘Not at present, no.’
Quinn asked: ‘What’s this thing I keep hearing about, a billabong?’
He told Quinn what billabongs were, reaches of river cut off from the main channel, where water was held far into dry times, so they became year-round havens for waterbirds.
‘Show me where the billabongs are,’ said Quinn.
They set off on a Sunday morning, down past the bank where he had parked his truck and camped in it. Louella and Lenny were sitting there on a log.
‘Get out of Cookie’s bedroom,’ said Quinn.
‘This is the lounge,’ said Louella. She collected Sadie and scooped her into her arms, hugging her with a fierce, blind affection.
In the tangled, shady light of the riverbank a wagtail shirred ahead from grass-stalk to grass-stalk. Quinn angled his head, looked thoughtful, and tried to say what the sound of the wagtail reminded him of. ‘You know those old galvanised iron kerosene pumps — they operated with a ball or something inside, and they had a wire handle. They made a sort of chuckle-chuckle knock-knock sound. Did you have them in Oz? You did? Well, that’s what the wagtail is like.’
Quinn said: ‘I’ve been a lot of things: truck driver, bridge builder, shepherd, meat worker. I always listen to people. I was a trawlerman, and I got to know Japs. People say you can’t know them, but you can.’
The billabong stank of mud. Carp crowded in to the shallows where they were dying. Sadie waded through them, snapping to right and left. Quinn unbuttoned his shirt, stood back with his hands on his hips, and surveyed the birdlife with dark, shining eyes. There were pelicans, ducks, cormorants, finches. Quinn handed over his camera, and settled himself on a heronshit-patterned dead tree. He spat into his hands and brushed back his hair, and tidied his moustache.
‘I want my girlfriend to see that I’m happy over here,’ he said. ‘She thinks maybe she knocked me for six when she told me she wouldn’t be seeing me any more. But you know, when they’re that young, you’re sad all the time because of the age difference. It’s like dancing with smoke. The Japs say “utsoroi”, the moment when things are changing. The moment of death. That light should come on, is it on? Okay, take my photo.’
MOMENTUM
Cal came into the kitchen, half-smiling, angling sideways, staring at the food table with a disdainful twist to his thick, wide lips. He was a physical force come to a standstill. The floor seemed to dip in the direction of Cal like a weatherboard whirlpool. Others milled around while he made up his mind what he wanted.
‘I don’t care, Cookie,’ he shrugged, transferring food to his plate with a blunt wrist action. Pumpkin, peas, mashed potato, mutton. What did it matter? Burgers and chips were Cal’s soul food, beer and Jack Daniel’s his spiritual refreshment. Fights were his glory.
He watched Cal trudge around the spread, getting his share of tinned fruit, UHT cream (crushing the carton in his fist), red jelly. ‘Anything else?’ No reply. The others pressing behind him expressed their usual exhausted truculence — ‘This looks good’ — ‘What’s this here shit?’ — ‘Pile it on, Cookie’ — but Cal made him afraid. There was nothing compromised about him. The first time, when he asked him his full name, his eyes cannoned in slow motion towards the questioner. Then he looked down. ‘Calvin.’ The utterance was like the drop of steel into the innards of a pinball machine. It held Cal’s attention while he wallowed in introspection. The name rolled, tumbled, slipped from his tongue. ‘Calvin’ — said with an extra, unneeded movement of the lips, a foam of spittle at the corner of the mouth, as if between the ‘I’ and the ‘v’ there was something else, a chomp, a rip, a delectation of strangeness. Then he raised his head again, as if coming up from the depths of water, shedding a weight. Something echoed back into his brain as he met another set of eyes. ‘Calvin.’
Watching Calvin eat, he imagined him gnawing on human bones and spitting gristle to the dust. He thought if there came a night when graves opened and the dead walked, Calvin would be there.
One day at Gograndli Station Cal became animated. ‘What’s dis? Dis any good, Cookie?’ He was in a good mood. It was corned leg there on the table — a different colour. Something had touched him, an incident in the shed, a word of praise or blame or aggression, a letter from home? He poked the mottled pink and brown of the meat with serving tongs. Back in New Zealand Cal’s uncle was a famous Maori orator. The family kept an eye on him. The overseer was Cal’s cousin. The others were animated, light-hearted or grave, having the full range of experience to play with. But Calvin seemed to have wrestled potential to a standstill — crushed it with inexorable strength. He only moved fast when he ran for a cold beer, or raced to the showers before the hot water went. Then his run was like a heavy trot, a topple, a lumber. Other times he dragged his toes in the dust.
One Sunday morning at Gograndli Sadie went crazy following new smells. She tracked splashes of blood. He walked up from where he was camped on the river and saw a shadow in the meat house. A freshly killed sheep had been put there the night before. Now it had a companion, a smaller, darker double. He went up to the gauze and saw it was a wild pig. Its chest had been cleaved open and the guts taken out. His dirtied butcher’s knife hung where the last knifestroke had finished. Dried mud caked the pig’s grey, mottled bristles. A jellied mass of ruby-red blood lay splashed on the cement.
He learned what had happened. Cal and the classer and the shed hands had driven to Ivanhoe to go to the pub. Coming home their headlights had caught a sucking pig on the rain-spattered track. The classer set his dog to it. The dog cornered the pig in a culvert. Someone found a screwdriver in the glove box and ran out into the dark, and drove it into the pig’s brain.
On Monday while he prepared the pork there was a battle going on in the shed over Cal’s attitudes. From what he could gather Winston Didale wanted Cal sacked. He shore in a dream, he had seen it himself in the few minutes before smoko, when he took the sandwich boxes over and lingered a minute, assessing the scene before going back to fetch the tea billies. ‘Cal is lazy,’ said Harold. Straightening his back from his work Cal had the preoccupied, distanced look of a man about to do something immediate, particular. The same wide spread of gravity that ripped galaxies apart focused on insignificant Calvin. Where was the knife, the pigsticker, the gun? Cal had all the time in the world as he lowered his handpiece and unclenched the cramp in his fingers. The grower stood beside the wool table with his arms folded over his skinny chest, his mind full of the implications of a few cents here and there, the hocks not taken off cleanly, the national disaster of second cuts (where the sheep were left striped with unusable wool). While Cal rotated his gaze, work structures shattered. They were bullshit to Cal — the collapsing and re-assembling pattern of the camp; the administrative needs of the contractor, the one who looked after him, Harold; the wants of the grower; the paperwork; the food orders; getting the wool away. Pah.
Harold took Cal aside and spoke a few stern, whispered words. ‘It grieves me to see you with these attitudes, brother.’ Cal dropped his chin. Okay, he’d surrender his handpiece and work the wool board instead. Why de fuck not.
Calvin was no longer a shearer. He was a rousie now, what he had been since the age of seven and younger. What he had been since the mothers strung their baby baskets above the wool tables, bringing them into this life. There he went tripping along in his Adidas with a millet broom held loosely between the fingers of one hand, skirting, getting the shit separated from the bellies, arm-loading fleeces down to the end of the shed where the
owner still kept an eye on him. That owner — who was he? No shape or form that Calvin could see.
One day this same Calvin would take up the knife inside himself and he would carve. One day he would cut his image inside the house at the inland town where he lived with his unwedded wife and his new, beautiful daughter with her tiny brown limbs, her smokily glowing skin, her blue water-pool eyes and her lovely dark-petalled lips. Calvin would find himself holding her and chuckling with a deep, bewildered delight, and then he would go outside and think for a minute, and then he would come inside again and get started. Stubbies would smash on the walls. Upturned, the record player would shatter. The TV and the video would crash. Then Calvin would come to Harold’s house and take the twin-cab ute. He would drive for five hundred kilometres with his foot to the floor, take apart a shop in one of those towns over the border there, because something was needed for his child, something that no one would let him have, and turn around again and come back to the Western Division, listening to police calls on the UHF scanner, feeling himself slow down, tire, sink back red-eyed, satisfied, ready for the handcuffs and the time ahead when he would contemplate against the blankness of a cell wall whatever it was that appealed to him, locked him in, held him down, made him do what he did, made him who he was. Calvin.
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Just by listening to people and watching them as they talked he learned about another country.
It was mist-shrouded over there, constantly green, constantly raining. The living was hard. Prices were high. People worked seven days a week and had nothing. They drove old cars, Humber Hawks, Morris Oxfords, seventies Holdens. The main work was sheep-shearing, but there was other work too. People were slaughtermen, forest workers, deer hunters, road menders, fishermen, fence makers, dairymen, shepherds. When the season allowed, they did what they could.
That other country had no snow-capped alps, volcanoes, or boiling mud springs. It had steep, green, treeless pasturelands and glimpses of the sea. It had small towns orientated towards work, with only a school, a shop, a pub, a basketball court, a rugby field, an abattoir. It was a place bent on survival, asking no favours, making no pleas, offering few blandishments, taking no vacations. Home was a farm in a soaking hollow, a farm hand’s cottage, a shearers’ hostel owned by a contractor who transported workers around in a minibus. Reading matter was the sports page, the rugby magazine, The Holy Bible, The Book of Mormon. There was always a corner of the sitting room belonging to John Rambo, the SAS, Eddie Murphy. It was the age of the video. Beverages were draught beer, cordial, and milk. Among the roistering young it was Jack Daniel’s, Southern Comfort, whisky and Coke. To be tattooed with a Harley Davidson emblem, a rock group name or the image of a finely feathered New Zealand bird (the Kiwi) was good.
When they were children these people liked school although they did not learn much. When high school loomed they hated it, staying away as much as they could, hiding in the bush. Later they were resentful or sorry.
In Australia they worked far from the sea. Red sand ploughed up under the axles of their cars. They became lost at night in trackless wastes, looking for a workplace they had to reach for a dawn start. Nobody told them it would be as cold as it was at night in winter. When floods came sheeting from Queensland under a blue sky, the sight of water had them kicking their thongs off, stripping to their shorts, wading in a swivelling, trudging fashion through sticky grey mud while forty-degree heat blasted the shallow lakes of inland waterways.
They remembered how fishnets could be set at the end of sheep paddocks back home. There were ground ovens of red-hot stones. Cabbage trees grew along roads, their trunks ripped open to the hearts. Fish eyes and sea urchins were a feast. Abalone were scooped from their shells and munched raw, the pale flesh pulsating. Over smoking fires in wooden cottages, food-stained pots of pork bones, milk thistle, watercress and dumplings sat on the stove for a sleeve to be rolled up, a hand to reach in, a meal to be made. People set out for work early, they came home late. They worked seven days a week, worked under lights, drove themselves to exhaustion. They did what they could, but it was never enough. This was why they crossed the Tasman. They wanted more value for work done. They wanted to take a look. They wanted to give another country a try. They wanted to see what the fuss was about. They wanted something better for their children.
WORLD BEATER
‘The blokes turned up to pick him up and all they had was one of those little Suzuki two-seaters and there was two blokes already in it, it was only eight k’s out but he refused to hop in the back, he said, “I’m a shearer and not a sheepdog”.’
When everything was physical, straight-on, no room for reflection or contemplation, no choice, just the imperatives of work, feed, drink, play, sleep, work — when it was indefinably harder every new job to make a start, and still the body leant to the task, obeying the mind’s orders, doing it alone, for one, for this one — then this was what it was like being Lenny, surely.
Year after year a conclusion accumulated, fleece by fleece, carton by carton, smoke by smoke, shed by shed, fight by fight, woman by woman: Lenny would go spinning off the road some night at one hundred and forty k’s, thundering through the saltbush after striking a roo, hitting a culvert, coming to a dead stop after a long thumping roll, just a few stray noises, engine block sizzling sharply, a wet dying gurgle like the death of a sheep in the cab there, the vehicle smashed in, no more Lenny.
Almost forty, face full of strain, Lenny goes like a twenty-four-year-old lately come into his estate as a man. Lenny has a late-model ute with pieces of fender falling off, a green swag for roadside stops, a dustproof zipper-bag full of best clothes for going to town. Lenny has a two-way to chase work, to call for help if he’s stuck, to change jobs midstream, to answer the call from a mate in trouble, to locate the party if need be in whatever shed, in whatever town, on whatever riverbank or roadside it happens to materialise, the carton split open, the pig on the stones.
If the cocky at Gograndli Station (impossible) or at Gidgee Scrubs Station (maybe) invites Lenny up to the house and there are people, a dinner (as has happened), then Lenny will hold his wine to the light and say something appreciative as he rolls it round his tongue, swallowing it down and accepting another glass. ‘Very nice if you don’t mind me saying so, I shall have another one too, a nice aged sauvignon blanc, nothing like it.’
Or later, brooding: ‘I’m just a shearer. I’m just the lowest of the low. I’m just a bit of shit to get kicked around.’
Or being thanked in the shed for shearing a particular sheep by the cocky’s wife: ‘Don’t thank me, thank God I did it’.
Here’s Lenny on what is more his own full occasion, coming into the bar of the Waggoneer Hotel with the whiff of mutton and sheep-grease scrubbed off him, Lenny sprayed with male deodorants, drenched in Paco Rabanne, crunching cachous in the desire to be genial, ready, acceptable — not smelling like someone who holds woolly guts to himself all day — Lenny scrubbed away from what he does, now doing what he does next, Lenny the few-beers-under-the-belt man, Lenny the lover. ‘What? Marjorie not working tonight? What’s a bloke to make of that?’
Settle in for a night on the piss, then, Lenny.
Lenny smiling like a Chinese poet, his eyes down to slits, sipping his beer steadily through the evening, awaiting his chance, making long conversation, moving like a long-legged cat, putting his arm around someone, speaking the line: ‘What are we going to do about this thing, now that it’s happened between us?’
Needs are answered under the consideration of Lenny, who will always return, who will always remember, who will always follow the same tracks, baulk at the same gates, lie down under the same trees on the same old hillsides; Lenny with an air of self-ownership in his stance; Lenny sending postcards and letters, messages underlined and emphasised almost by rote: ‘Tell your wife that Lenny gave his regards’. Lenny the sender of red roses, the promoter of good times.
‘I said, “It must have been a wi
ld time in the back of the truck because of all the drinking and carrying on”. And he said, “Men pissing and spewing on you all the time. Mind you, it was tit for tat.”’
Lenny will never change the way people want him to, but there is something Lenny has always fought against, denied in himself, beaten down when others have seen it in him — that there might be another kind of life to be lived beyond the outlines of this one.
Sometimes Lenny begins to dare a question, shying away from it at the very moment of formulation — Lenny always going into orbit then like the final act of a tragedy just when something is developing, a chance to run his own shearing team, say, or settling down to live a consciously planned life, establishing a base in one of the main towns, Naracoorte, Hamilton, Broken Hill, Bourke, Charleville or Longreach.
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